There’s an underlying mechanism that causes us to be falsely confident in our command of knowledge and decision-making. We automatically construct narratives of comprehension, even when our command of the facts is feeble.

Defeating this requires intentional effort.

Idealistic founders believe they will break the mold when they scale, and not turn into a “typical big company.” By which they mean: Without stupid rules that assume employees are dumb or evil, without everything taking ten times longer than it should, without wall-to-wall meetings, without resorting to hiring anything less than the top 1% of the talent pool, and so on.

Why do they never succeed? What are the fundamental forces that transform organizations at scale?